Toowoomba Tourism Statistics

Toowoomba is Queensland's most popular inland tourism destination. Domestic overnight visitors spent 2.53 million nights in the Toowoomba region in 2023/24¹ and day-trippers made a further 2.22 million visits, while the region’s roughly 23,000 international visitors in 2024/25² stayed about 45 nights each, a combined 1.04 million nights. Most of those international visitors are visiting family, studying or working rather than holidaying, which explains the long stay. Tourism supports about 7,500 local jobs³, and the Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers each September is the region’s biggest drawcard, with a record 511,253 attendees in 2025⁴.

Tourism Research Australia’s National Visitor Survey puts domestic overnight visitor nights in the Toowoomba region at 2,527,885 in 2023/24¹, with a further 2,218,927 domestic day trips. International visitors added 771,292 nights that year, about 14% of all visitor nights. Because Tourism Research Australia is changing how it collects Australian resident travel data, no domestic figures at council-area level have been published for 2024/25, so 2023/24 is the latest complete year.

Domestic overnight nights have grown from 1.6 million in 2010/11 to a peak of 2.71 million in 2022/23¹ before easing to 2.53 million in 2023/24. Day trips have been steadier, moving between 1.7 million and 2.2 million a year across the whole period. Unlike coastal Queensland destinations, Toowoomba was not hit hard by COVID-19 border closures: domestic overnight nights rose to 2.24 million in 2020/21 as Queenslanders holidayed closer to home, and the 2022/23 peak followed two years of reopened interstate travel.

Over the five years to 2024/25, 49.1% of international visitors to Toowoomba (21,830 people)⁵ came mainly to visit friends and relatives and 23.4% (10,386) came for a holiday. The remaining 27.5% travelled for business, education, employment or other reasons; these are combined here because Tourism Research Australia suppresses each category individually where the survey sample is under 40 respondents. The pattern is the reverse of Queensland as a whole, where holidays account for 58% of international visitors and visiting friends and relatives for 26%. Holiday visitors to Toowoomba stayed 28.7 days on average, and friends-and-relatives visitors 19.6 days.

Modelling by the National Institute of Economic and Industry Research (NIEIR), published through economy.id, estimates that tourism generated $1.50 billion of output in the Toowoomba region in 2024/25³, of which $607.6 million was direct spending in tourism businesses and $891.6 million flowed through indirectly. Tourism’s value added was $735.4 million, 5.6% of the regional economy, and the industry supported 7,532 jobs, 4,353 of them directly. All three measures are well up on 2019/20, when tourism was worth $1.12 billion in output and 5,174 jobs. The figures are in constant 2018/19 prices.

The Carnival’s own figures show where visitors go: the Botanic Gardens in Queens Park (204,608 visitors during the 2024 Carnival⁹) and Laurel Bank Park (99,978) are the floral centrepieces. The program also includes the Grand Central Floral Parade, the ticketed Festival of Food and Wine, Sideshow Alley and the Toowoomba Region EATS food trail, which featured 65 floral-inspired dishes in 2024. Food and wine events, from Talking Pubs foodie tours to dinners at venues such as the Cobb+Co Museum’s Carriage Room, have been part of the event since its month-long format began in 2021¹⁰. The parks and the surrounding Darling Downs are easiest to explore by car, so visitors flying into Toowoomba Wellcamp Airport can compare car hire prices in Toowoomba before they travel.